November 06, 2007

VMware Web Management and IIS7 on Windows Server 2008

As I pointed out in a previous post, I wasn't able to find any love on teh intarwebs about how to get the VMware Web Management Interface to work on Windows Longhorn Server/IIS7.

Then I remembered: One of the cool things about IIS7 on Windows Server 2008 is that it provides you with the ability to 'emulate' IIS6's metabase and scripting interfaces.

So, I just made sure to install those components using the

Having installed VMware Server already on Win2k8, I knew that it crashed and burned (unsurprisingly) while trying to create the web site that would be used to allow HTTP management (over ports 8222 and 8333) of VMs and such.

So I added the IIS 6 Management compatability components:

And then proceeded with the install normally.

And, that did it. By giving VMware Server a suitable set of scripting interfaces to manage IIS and create a new site, everything worked flawlessly. (Of course, I had to go into the firewall and open up traffic on 8222, and 8333 for HTTP and HTTPs (as well as for port 902 for authorization/normal VMware traffic).)

Running VMware Server on Windows Server 2008 RC0 - x64Sadly, I couldn't get VMware server to run on the x64 version of RC0.

During the x32 installation, I got a prompt telling me that some unsigned drivers were detected - should I let them through? I let them on.

With the installation on x64 Windows Server 2008, there was no such warning/prompt. And I simply couldn't log into VMware's Web Interface or via the normal console - as I kept being told that the server "actively refused" the connection. Checking out all of the VMware services on my box, I could see that the Auth Service wasn't running. Starting it just resulted in errors. Happily in the Security Log I could see audit failures at roughly the same time:

Code integrity determined that the image hash of a file is not valid. The file could be corrupt due to unauthorized modification or the invalid hash could indicate a potential disk device error.

That's a spiffy error, and it also listed the file in question: vmx86.sys - the same file/component that the VMware Authentication service depended upon.

I tried supressing those warnings/issues by using bcdedit /SET nointegritychecks ON, but there was no love (even after a reboot).

So.. that's when I decided to bail and just switch to Windows Server 2008 Enterprise (to take advantage of my 8GB of RAM). Maybe by the time Longhorn RTMs there will be a good work-around, or someone else will figure out how to pull it off, but I wasted about 2 hours on it and decided that enough was enough...